It is sometimes necessary to apply a heavy coating of concrete or the like to pipes for underwater use, for example oil pipelines, to counteract their buoyancy. Such heavy coatings require reinforcement to enable them to withstand the forces they encounter in use.
From U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,033,387 and 4,134,197, along with the corresponding patents of applicant N. V. BEKAERT S.A., it is already known how to use for this purpose the reinforcing strip of welded wire mesh mentioned in the opening lines. The applicant, N. V. BEKAERT S.A., markets these reinforcing strips under the trade name ARMAPIPE.RTM.. In a special embodiment of this known reinforcing strip, all longitudinal wires of the welded mesh are equally deformed and evenly distributed over the breadth (width) of the reinforcing strip.
In winding such a reinforcing strip around a pipe or during the embedding of such a strip in the coating while the coating is being applied to the pipe, it is in most cases desirable that the successive windings of a layer of reinforcing strip should partially overlap one another.
In the use of the reinforcing strips known up to the present, there is the disadvantage that, in winding the strip with partial overlapping of the adjacent successive windings, the adhesion of the concrete coating to the reinforcing metal strips is unsufficient.